The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Monday, March 18, 2013

The human doughnut

Sethren, I do not want to dwell on the old, the Abrahamic
religions, for they are fucked.

Hold on.

I watched the fraternity’s television last
night. The brothers had chosen a socially reverberant drama about a disadvantaged minority, teenage
zombies in point of fact, and we were introduced to the right-on phrase, partially deceased syndrome.Sethren, while the theological question
remains open, should a morally responsible teacher use the term fucked at all? let alone in direct
apposition to the Abrahamic religions, I hereby transmute the term fucked to partially deceased.

Sethren, I do not want to dwell on the old, the Abrahamic
religions, for they are partially deceased.However, before we turn our attention from demons to other aspects of
the symbiosis between Culture and the human organism, I must pose the question,
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Apparently devotees to the cause of Christian
Scholasticism in the medieval period talked of little else throughout an
otherwise uneventful Tuesday afternoon in 1273.But I want to slightly change the question.

How many demons are there in a needle?

Irreducible difference, sethren.

Such pursuit can divide differences into differences, demons
into demons, for ever.So, as a first
attempt, I’m going to try it on a fairly coarse scale.Forgive me.

In practice, in daily life, we know the difference between a needle and anything else without thinking about it. Needle is a quite simple natural concept. It is a demon. The only thing we might confuse a needle with
is a pin. However, at the level of anatomisation and analysis, more demons appear. These are demons that exist separately from the needle demon in the neural substrate and in the metaverse, but like all demons can reiterate themselves at the drop of a hat and appear anywhere else in an ideoverse or in the metaverse, in this case winking and glimmering about the surface of the needle itself. The first of these demons, these irreducible differences, is function, a difference of function.A needle is for drawing a
thread, cord or strip of hide through something, a skin or something
woven.A pin is for fixing something to
something else.

Blimey, sether Cavilia, I had hoped to get away with that
for a bit.Yes, it is a sad fact that there
is a bin not thirty paces yonder, labelled “sharps”.And, yes sether, yes indeed, it is for the deposition,
yes sether Albert, as it may be by the company of those fucked (but now, sether,
we say partially deceased) by the ill-advised addition of such as heroin to
their own bloodstreams; for the deposition of their hypodermic needles.Which, as you so joyfully point out, are not
for the drawing of a thread through a textile.And, I’ll do it before you do, you could say that they are for
puncturing the skin in order to introduce a fluid into the
bloodstream. As it might be, the tooth
of a cobra.And so there are, sether, other
things too, the sting of a wasp, with which a needle could easily be elided.

One difference, I said, between a needle and a pin is,
function.Luckily, there is
another.Topology.

A needle is a thing with a hole in it.A pin isn’t.

One of the demons that differentiate between a needle and a
pin is a hole.A lot of people are not
quite clear about what exactly that is, a hole.It is simple, and a needle is a good example. Topologically, a hole is where you can put a thread through,
bring the ends together, and the needle cannot escape without breaking the
thread.That is a hole.A cup is topologically identical to a needle.You can put a string through the handle, and
hang the cup from it.A teapot has two
holes.And a cereal bowl has none, like
a pin.Finally, a hypodermic needle has one
hole, just like a sewing needle.Think about
it.So a hypodermic needle is a needle, topologically identical to a sewing needle, not a pin. We're okay there.
Yes, sether, the fang of a snake
is like a needle, but only when it's not attached to a poison sac. Which it usually is. Then you
can stick a very fine filament up the middle of the fang of a snake into the poison sac,
but you can’t get it out anywhere.There
is no hole. It's the same as a sphere, or a balloon. Topologically a balloon has no hole in it, otherwise how could you blow it up? And you can't possible confuse a balloon with a needle. Get a grip, sether.

Sether Albert, your lack of discretion knows no decent
bounds.Here we are, in a layby, by a
bus stop, in a public place, and you just keep going.Okay, I will answer.Yes.The human skin is continuous, toroidal, and has three holes in it.Yes sether, mine has too, but that ends in the bladder, and is
topologically the same as a bowl or a sphere.The human skin is topologically the same as a tee-shirt.And the aperture you keep shouting about, yes
you are, sether, and people are looking… St Richard describes it thus, first quoting Lewis Wolpert:

It is not birth, marriage of death, but gastrulation, which
is truly the most important time in your life.

Gastrulation is thus.In deuterostomes, of which clade we are a
member, the blastula, the very early embryo, is round like a ball.Then an indentation forms, so it becomes like
a bowl (which is topologically identical to a ball).Within this bowl the blastopore develops, and that becomes the gut and kindred organs.But nothing topological has
happened yet.Later, the mouth forms, and it is only when the two, mouth and anus, are conjoined by the gut, through which, though not
with ease, a string might pass (yes, yogic adepts, so I have heard, sether)
that we become topologically the same as a teacup or a length of copper
piping. It is only then that we, along with the rest of the animal kingdom, gain our true toroidal existence. And then, only briefly. When the nostrils develop, we
lose it again, we stop being the same as a tea-cup, and become the same as a tee-shirt.No, sether, not as a pair of trousers.A Pair of trousers is topologically identical
to a button or a bow. But not rings and things. Rings and things are equivalent to a needle. Annular. Full circle.

I grow weary, sethren.I had foreseen distraction, but not on this
scale.

How simple a needle now seems,
does it not.A thing with merely one
hole.Let us rejoice.

I know, sethren, partly deceased
syndroming outrageous.And it is meant
to be early spring.The jetstream has
split asunder and half of it is down in North Africa, the rest in Spain, while we
on the ringroad here in Huddersfield are in the kingdom of the polar bear, and
the poor bears swelter iceless in a landscape redolent of the Huddersfield
ringroad.In answer to this misery, the
plump pink public schoolboys rub their plump pink squelchy hands together and wetly
dream of fracking.

Off to feast in the fleshpots of
the town.Tomorrow we will finally
compute how many are the demons in a needle.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.